Jul 28 / Christian Bull

From Pixels to Emotions:

The Magic of Visual Storytelling for VFX!

How do you make VFX feel epic? It’s probably not what you think….


The Allure of Realism in Visual Effects

In visual effects, we are often trying to recreate the real world to fool the audience into thinking what we’ve made is real. The problem with the real world, from our point of view, is that it is filled with an abundance of details! This tendency leads visual effects artists to become obsessed with details and realism.

The Importance of Visual Storytelling in VFX
The problem with this is that it stops us from thinking about the story, and that’s why learning to be a visual storyteller is incredibly important if you want to work with visual effects. You can NEVER recreate all the details from reality. So that means you have to choose what to focus on. Or, in the case of many artists, they just keep going until they run out of time!

Discarding Unnecessary Details for Storytelling
But the truth is that not all details matter. Some are much more important than others. And that’s where the story comes in. Every detail that contributes to the story is important. Every detail that doesn’t can be discarded. No - every detail that doesn’t add to the story SHOULD be discarded, and burned with fire!
The Power of Metaphorically and Literally Zooming Out
Imagine you’re working on a shot. As a VFX professional, you almost always work on that shot in isolation. But that’s crazy! To fully understand the story of that shot, you need to see it with the shot next to it. And to understand THOSE shots, you need to see them in the context of the sequence. And to understand the sequence, you need to see it in the context of the whole film or episode!

It’s a very common experience for VFX artists to spend months on a shot, only to watch the film and realize that they could’ve done half the amount of work because a lot of the time was spent on stuff that the audience doesn’t care about. So the trick is to metaphorically zoom out, allow your mind’s eye to zoom out to think about the purpose of the project you’re working on, and then think about how you can contribute to THAT. As a professional, that also means thinking about all of your colleagues and how your work affects them. Artists who are able to do that get promoted insanely quickly!

Metaphorical zooming out isn’t enough though. You should also literally zoom out! I notice that when I give my artists feedback on something they’re working on, I instinctively take two or three steps backward from their monitor. If I’m really trying to see the big picture, I might keep walking backward and accidentally fall down the stairs. But it’s worth it. That way I don’t get pulled into the details and I can see what matters the MOST.

If the work doesn’t work at a distance, then it sure as hell won’t work close up. And YET as we work on our (potentially 4k) monitors, we naturally get closer…and closer…and cloooser.

These details are NOT what makes Spongebob special! We KNOW this and still focus on the wrong things in our VFX!


Understanding Abstraction and Its Role in VFX

Visual storytelling is all about having empathy with your audience and using that empathy to guide them to the point that YOU want them to reach.

And that really is what we’re talking about when we’re talking about composition. And if you want to understand how to use composition as a visual artist, I would recommend studying abstraction.

This is not common at all in visual effects because abstraction is the opposite of detail!

But that’s why it’s so important.

Let’s start with the most simple possible example.

In this image, we have a diagonal line

And in this image, we have another diagonal line.

If you’re coming from a culture that reads from left-to-right, you will probably find the first one to be a slightly more challenging, stressful image because it’s going uphill. And conversely, you will find the second one more relaxing because your eye can just slide down the hill!

If you read in the opposite direction, your reaction might be the opposite.

Let’s go one step further with these two images:
I KNOW that one of these is more stressful but more exciting to look at than the other. And you know that too, without me telling you which one is supposed to have what effect, right? That’s composition. Guiding the audience’s eye by having an understanding of how they are going to react.


And that’s ALL it is. As you add in layers of complexity such as tone and colour and depth, things get more tricky. But the basics of visual storytelling are always the same, and it really is as simple as these examples show. Next time you’re watching a film, pause it, and think “how are they guiding my eye here?”. You’ll learn a TONNE that way.

However, I can guarantee that the minute that you open up Maya or Blender or Fusion or Nuke or whatever software you’re using to start work on your visual effects, you will instantly forget this! We all do!

So form the daily habit of reminding yourself to keep distance, form the habit of stepping back and looking at the big picture, both metaphorically and literally, and notice the difference that it makes in your work. You’ll be ten times as effective, as you’ll focus on only what matters, and let the rest slide.

And maybe that’s a good lesson for life in general too!

Have a great weekend!